The Pomp Podcast
#1211 Bill Clerico On Investing MILLIONS To Solve Wildfire Crisis
- Bill Clerico founded Convective Capital, a $35M venture fund exclusively focused on investing in technology, software, and hardware solutions for wildfire mitigation, prevention, and treatment.
- Wildfires have become exponentially more destructive due to a century of fire suppression combined with climate change, denser fuel loads (4–5x historical density), and human infrastructure built in wildland-urban interface zones.
- The addressable market spans multiple sectors: federal spending (infrastructure bill, IRA funds), utilities (PG&E alone spends $7–8B annually on mitigation), insurance (losing $10–15B/year), and real estate, totaling ~$50B in annual U.S. spending.
- Portfolio companies span detection (Pano AI cameras, Overstory satellite vegetation monitoring), suppression (Rain autonomous drones), home resilience (Delos insurance, FireMaps risk analysis), and landscape treatment (BurnBot prescribed burning robotics).
- Air quality from wildfires causes an estimated 33,500 deaths annually in the U.S.—far exceeding direct fire deaths—and represents an emerging global public health crisis.
- Wildfires generate 5% of global CO2 emissions (larger than Russia's total), making wildfire mitigation one of the highest-leverage, shortest-timeline levers for reducing carbon emissions.